Showing Like a Queen: Female Authority and Literary Experiment in Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton

For most Renaissance English thinkers, queenship was a catastrophe, a political accident that threatened to emasculate an entire nation. But some English poets and playwrights proved more inventive in their responses to female authority.

In Showing Like a Queen, Katherine Eggert argues that Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton turned the political problem of queenship to their advantage by using it as an occasion to experiment with new literary genres. Unlike other critics who have argued that a...